Participatory viewers’ engagement with the dual translation problem on the danmu interface: a social semiotic case study

Abstract This article looks at participatory viewers’ engagement with foreign language video contents facilitated by the danmu interface on a video-sharing website in China. Using the video of the Chinese athlete Sun Yang’s public hearing hosted on Bilibili as a case study, this article investigates Bilbili users’ danmu-based translational efforts and their engagement with the translation problem inherent in the hearing through multimodal discourse analysis, with supportive analysis of individual users’ danmu footprints from a diachronic perspective. Danmu-based viewer activities are approached from the social semiotic perspective and situated in the distribution stratum of the communicative practice of video sharing, with a view to understand participatory viewers’ meaning making processes in their consumption of videos on the danmu interface. The findings show a manifest willingness from participatory viewers to engage with the dual translation problem specific to this case, who submit different kinds of translational inputs onto the video frame in response to the untranslated video and articulate translation-related discourses as prompted by the inherent translation problem in the video. This study contributes to social semiotic discourse analysis of danmu-mediated communication as well as to non-professional translation studies through a focus on novel translation practices emergent in the Chinese context of participatory viewing.